Last Sunday, I kept a promise and took my son rabbit hunting. In no mood for firearms, I guided.

My son’s lever-action rifle is elegant but limited, a boy’s gun suitable for humanely dispatching small animals at close range, plinking targets and not much else. It is very slow to load so it sports a 12-round magazine, enough for a morning’s hunt and a little plinking. I watched my son’s small hands carefully load the tiny cartridges, fairly certain that he was handling a future piece of contraband.

A decade ago, in this newspaper, I denounced the crassness that arose on both sides of the gun debate in the aftermath of 9-11 and called for pragmatic dialogue. It was a feeble bleat, drowned by a growing cultural tsunami. Our old gun fantasy, one of a noble protector slaying an intruder, has now been replaced by a cordite-laden phantasm where it rains lead, snows brass, and the sweetest sounds are magazines dropping and the ting of grenade pins. The enemy: legions of terrorists, aliens, Nazis, or even zombies. In our hands are hell-spitting death machines that mow down baddies by the truckload.

The trend is not without a counterpoint. We now also presume to be more compassionate. The fact that we are not matters little. Here, words trump deeds and feelings trump reason. Tears are even better.

Culturally, we’ve traded our accelerator for a switch with just two settings: either 5 mph or 85. This is why we can equip a lunatic with horribly efficient weapons, body armor, and all manner of tactical gear yet refuse to call him a lunatic. That would be hurtful. He is troubled, or disordered, or suffers from (fill in the latest) syndrome, or any other euphemism we use to make ourselves feel better about our abject neglect of the mentally ill. To use a once-trendy euphemism, we’re culturally bipolar.

Whatever happened to insanity? It is in the societal dustbin next to single-shot rifles and revolvers.

Trouble is, insanity doesn’t go away just because we give it a nice name and feign concern. Ask anyone who struggles to care for a mentally ill relative. Those valiant souls are some of the best among us yet they receive our dregs.

We can regulate a restaurant menu, but we shirk this most elemental function of government. Any talk of a presidential commission on mental illness? Unlike the one forming to deal with guns, any legislation resulting from such a commission would be certain to save lives.

But those urbane folk who hate guns hate even more an unglamorous problem that requires getting your hands dirty to solve, with precious little thanks at the end. Look no further than the bands of mentally ill who wander their city streets. They have never had the courage to call them insane. They labeled them homeless and turned them into more ammunition for their culture war.

As for guns, there is a point where a firearm ceases to be a tool and becomes a machine. Like pornography, it’s hard to define but we know it when we see it. Any ban would be an empty gesture, a meaningless lurch.

For those gun-porn lovers in body armor who want to blast away at zombie mannequins with their Kalashnikovs, a Sig Sauer on one hip and a Glock on the other, by all means have at it. But have the courage to admit your fascination with human killing machines and get ready to prove — prove — that you can bear the responsibility as well as the arms.

Richard Senatro is a hunter and freelance writer who lives in Phoenix.

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